Apple MBP 17-inch Unibody: Benchmarked and Thoughts

This site may earn affiliate commissions from the links on this page. Terms of use.

The Unibody 17-inch MBP completes the circle of Apple laptops that received the new aluminum enclosure. The design is absolutely gorgeous, and with all the additions, including a huge battery and twin graphics chipsets, Apple still kept it feathery light; it’s the lightest laptop in its class. The big story here, though, is the battery, as it is now a non-removable one. Despite the initial shock, what Apple did actually worked in its favor. The original 68WH battery is now 40% bigger, now at 95WH. Without benchmarking the system, you already know that battery life is bound to improve.

See how the battery scored after the jump.

The first battery test was done under the Mac operating system, at half-brightness and with the nVidia GeForce 9400M GT chipset. After running down “The Titanic” DVD, the Unibody 17-inch scored 4 hours and 14 minutes, or 6 minutes shy of what Apple reported with its DVD rundown tests. Under the nVidia 9600M GT, a discrete and more resource intensive chipset, a standard DVD rundown wasn’t demanding enough of this powerful graphics card; it was getting the same battery life as the 9400M chipset. So we took a 1080p HD video, as HD decoding will stress a discrete chipset, and looped it. The results came in 2 hours and 40 minutes, which over an hour less than the integrated graphics chipset. Running day-to-day tasks like web surfing and word processing get you close to 6.5 hours, not exactly the 8 hours that Apple reported but still very impressive. It was a bold move to make the battery a permanent fixture, but it paid off for Apple.